The term “wireless” normally refers to an electrical or electronic operation that is accomplished without the use of a “hard wired” connection. “Wireless communications” is the transfer of information over a distance without the use of electrical conductors or wires. The distances involved may be short (a few meters for television remote controls) or very long (thousands or even millions of kilometers for radio communications).
Along with the advancements in wireless communications technology, radio modules providing different wireless communications services can now be co-located or coexist in a wireless communications device. However, for reducing the hardware cost, the radio resources, such as the antennas, equipped in the wireless communications device are generally shared between multiple radio modules. Therefore, how to manage the limited radio resource shared between multiple radio modules becomes an important issue.
Several time division duplex (TDD) solutions have been developed for dealing with the issue of sharing radio resources between multiple radio modules co-located in a wireless communications device. Based on the concept of the TDD solutions, the time granted for using the shared radio resources for one radio module is separated from that of the other radio module(s). However, one notable disadvantage of the TDD solutions is that the data transmission throughput will be downgraded since each radio module must sacrifice a portion of time of using the radio resources for the other radio module(s). The data transmission throughput downgrade becomes more serious when the amount of data transmission for a radio module is greatly increased. The amount of data transmission will be greatly increased in some scenarios, such as the multiple Base Station, or called multiple access point, application for which a radio module connects to multiple base stations or multiple access points, multiple profile application for which a radio module simultaneously provide multiple profiles, or the likes.
In this regard, novel communications apparatuses and methods for managing the limited radio resources between multiple radio modules to achieve a desirable data transmission throughput performance are highly desired.